Twenty-two words, and nearly every one can be read in at least two ways. Dave Bonta's "Summit" gives us no names, no place and no event. It gives us a mood of ceremony and a few slippery phrases, and it leaves us to decide where we are standing. The title points two directions at once. A summit can be a mountaintop or a meeting of world leaders, and the poem keeps both meanings alive without choosing.
The first stanza is a single sentence, and its pivot is the word "lying." Read one way, it means telling falsehoods, and the phrase "a solemn day for lying" turns lying into an occasion with its own dignity, almost a ritual. Read another way, it means lying down, as in a body lying in state or a person stretched out on a hillside. "Solemn" supports that second reading, since it is a funeral word. The poem never settles it, and the effect is unsettling: a day of mourning and a day of deceit seem to be the same day. Then comes "when the truth dropped." The verb is flat and heavy, and the line ends on a hard stop with the "-pped" closing it off. Truth here is something that falls like a dropped object, and perhaps something that "drops" like news or a bomb. Judging by the imagery, the poem seems to be about truth coming down from a height while everyone around it keeps lying. That is only an inference, because the poem never says who lies or why.
The second stanza changes register completely. The questions are casual, almost overheard: "what do they shoot / at that time of day." The ceremony of the first stanza is gone, and the tone is closer to a bystander's curiosity. "Shoot" is another double word. It could mean hunting or gunfire, or it could mean photographers and film crews, which would fit the idea of a summit as a staged public event. It could even point to drugs. The poem offers no way to choose. The phrase "at that time of day" adds to the vagueness by suggesting something routine, a thing that simply happens at dusk or dawn. After the solemnity of the opening, violence or spectacle sounds oddly ordinary.
The last line, "how high is high," is where the poem tips from puzzling into playful and a little bleak. It is nearly a tautology, since high is high, yet it still works as a real question. It could be about altitude, since we have been invited up a mountain. It could be about rank, meaning how much power a "high-level" gathering really has. It could be about intoxication. The line is also a shrug, a refusal to give a measurement. Meanwhile the poem has built a vertical shape. "Summit" and "high" sit at the top, "dropped" falls from it, and "lying" is the horizontal position at the bottom. The truth falls down this axis while the speaker asks, with a kind of dazed innocence, how far up anyone can actually go.
Sound holds the fragments together. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, but the long "i" returns like a faint echo in "lying," "time," "high" and "high." The word "day" appears twice, first as "a solemn day" and then in "time of day," so the ceremonial and the casual seem to share a clock. The poem also has no punctuation and no capitals, and its questions carry no question marks. That makes them hover instead of demanding answers, as if no one is quite certain anyone is listening. The short, uneven lines (five words, then four, then four, five, four) give the poem a stuttering, breath-catching pace, and the stanza break leaves a gap where the truth has fallen and no one picks it up.
The poem's interest lies in how much it manages without saying anything directly. It asks the reader to do the work of deciding what "lying," "dropped" and "shoot" mean, and each answer changes the tone, from elegy to satire to something stranger. A reader who takes it as political comment will hear a joke about leaders staging solemnity while truth hits the ground. A reader who takes it as a mountain scene will hear grief under the open air. Both readings work, and the poem's gift is that it makes us feel the uncertainty between them.